Wednesday, July 16, 2008

As Jason mentioned a few posts ago, our time has come to attack the exterior of our home. We've done quite a bit of landscaping planting lots of pretty things, but we've done nada to the actual exterior of the house (aside from maiming it with new openings and a particularly nasty repair job to one window that was removed). So with the Village lighting a fire under our feet, we've gotten bids from four companies to do the painting. Now we just have to choose colors.

Ah, color choices. Always so intimidating. But our scope got limited b/c, according tot the quotes we rec'd, looks like we can't afford to get the vinyl siding painted. Which really is too bad - the best color schemes we've been playing with involved a new color on the siding. So the white will have to stay. So we ordered the Bungalow Exterior book, and using a very very old exterior shot (and hence none of our pretty flowers to get in the way!) have been playing around using Sherwin Williams Historic Arts & Crafts Collection - they have a really nifty paint tool that even gives the RGB values to duplicate the colors (great for Photoshop-ing your house).

Anyways, at midnight last night we decided to stop playing and just do. Not so sure what these are looking like in the light of day, but with the help of Bungalow Colors: Exteriors, we've come up with the following color schemes:

(click any photo to view a larger image)

OPTION ONE

OPTION TWO

OPTION THREE

OPTION FOUR

Of course, there's also the option of keeping the stucco white, with a fresh coat on everything ... maybe adding green to the trim on the windows instead of just the brown ...

Inquiring minds want to know - which one do you like? Or do you abhor them all? We need second, third, twenty-seventh opinions. :)

17 comments:

Too bad we couldn't have more fun with color like Jen did originally. But some of the painters recommended not painting the vinyl due to expansion issues anyway, so it probably works out for the best. I wonder though... how abnormal would it be to have trim around windows etc. in a different color than the soffit (underside of the eaves)? Hmm...

I liked #4 Deepin 5 & 7. Watch out for yellow as it comes out much brighter than the sample. You don't want to look like a banana or a canary. I also like a deep green with rust trim. Check out what the colors will look like in the neighborhood as you don't want to stand out in a bad way. Pink, purple, turquiose ect. Get my drift. That would apply to any neighborhood. I don't like leaving the stucco white. As it ages. It looks dirty & dingy very quickly.

Okay.... I like 2 or 4, but I need to have the door a blue (like a northwoods blue) color, and possibly the trim around the windows a blue trim. Just my 2cent if we want to keep it an Arts and Crafts Bungalow.

Let me begin by saying my monitor doesn't show colors well so I can only guess about your options (based on what you named them my monitor is way off). And I don't know much about historically accurate colors for your sort of house - but I think the white siding is going to push you a bit out of the historically accurate box. Given all that as a beginning point - here's 2 cents worth from a complete stranger who likes what you've done so far!

The darker colors on the stucco looks odd to me with the white siding - probably because the dark colors look heavier. So I'd probably stay midtone or lighter for the stucco - but not too light or you get the dingy look no matter the color.

I can't see any reason why the window & door trim needs to match the soffit other than to keep the number of colors down.

I like Julie's idea of blue for door & trim. The red door seems a bit too high contrast with the white. I'm guessing that the roof is brown - if you get the right blue it works well with browns.

So I'd probably lean towards a light to midtone brown on the stucco (about as dark as option #3) with a dark to midtone blue trim for the windows & door. If the roof is brown you could do the roof trim dark brown (like it appears to be now) or the same blue as window trim. For the door itself I'd do midtone blue (same shade but lighter than trim) or reddish burgundy (darker than the red shown but not a really dark burgundy).

Sorry to ramble on so long - hard to describe colors well when we're not all looking at the same thing.

I am so glad to have found your blog and hopefully be of some constructive help. While I think that paint collections assembled by the major companies can be helpful in narrowing down choices, they also can be delusional as they imply that any of the colors can be used together because they're all historic, bungalow, victorian, etc. One of the biggest and most common errors homeowners commit is the red door. Your colors not only have to be in character for your house, but of your neighborhood as well and reflect the flavor of the locale. For instance, in a big city you wouldn't think that a woman dressed in a black suit, walking down the street with bright red shoes and/or lipstick would be out of place...she looks right there. But take her to the Kroger's in Coshocton, Ohio and she looks terribly out of place. Your proposed color schemes are very formal and best suited to a city townhouse, not an arts and crafts bungalow. You have the challenge of getting the white vinyl and the rest of the facade to look as hand crafted as can be possible. Contrast is very formal, you have very dark trim against the white. The most formal thing is a tuxedo, black and white. Contrast also makes objects and spaces appear smaller. This is because of the way your eye processes information. My suggestion is to lose the red door, it looks a bit commercial and does not say welcome or this house is made by craftsmen. Creating contrast between the stucco and the vinyl only draws attention to the vinyl which then becomes even more artificial looking and applied. Your goal is to blend that in and to create other focal points so that the vinyl becomes secondary, maybe even tertiary to the entire presentation. I can't see the color of the roof, nor do I know what the neighborhood is like but I might suggest a color for the trim which is nature driven. By that I mean color which is very muted so that it mimics the types of tones seen in natural materials. The intent of the arts and crafts movement was all about the quality of the material guided by the artisan vision of the hand. Keep it real and your house will be best served. Here's a palette suggestion; trim: HC-147, Woodlawn Blue, door: HC-145, Van Courland Blue...both Benjamin Moore. Please don't rely on your computer monitor even if you get RGB values. Dollars to donuts your monitor is not calibrated properly unless you are a graphics design professional with tens of thousands of dollars invested in your equipment. Also, pixels are not paint so you will most often be mislead. I provide color palettes for everyday folks professionally and I've seen zillions of color combinations applied both inside and out. I am 110% confident that this will be a color scheme you can be comfortable with and it will make your house the jewel of the neighborhood. Good luck.

I like either 1 or 3. Light but not too light. I agree about yellow, it can be very bright. I once painted a room yellow, and man oh man, it was like living inside a banana. Although, I guess it would be more like living right next to a large banana, because if you lived in a banana I suppose it would be quite dark. What with the sealed peal and all. Of course, I don't think living in a banana would really work for a person because of lack of oxygen, not to mention the fact that humans are much larger than bananas. At least any banana I have ever seen.

I typically don't go for the lighter colors but I like 1 and 3. We're in the same boat as you guys with aluminum, vinyl and wood so our painting will have to go in phases and the overall look isn't what we want - at least until we hit the jackpot and can take all that crap off the house.

Wow - thanks all for the incredible comments! It's given us a lot to consider, and we may have to try some revised color schemes, given of course the limitations of trying to recreate actual paint on a digital monitor.

And for TOPB, if we hit the jackpot, I think I would setup a "Bungled Bungalow Restoration Fund" for homeowners such as ourselves.